How the Other Half Still Lives

The Nation, March 17, 2003 issue

How the Other Half Still Lives

JACK NEWFIELD

In 1890 the great photojournalist Jacob Riis published his now classic book about immigrant tenement poverty in lower Manhattan, called How the Other Half Lives. During the past few months I have tried to retrace some of Riis's steps through modern New York's pain and deprivation. As New York's (and America's) economy has turned bleaker and bleaker, I hung out in unemployment offices, food-stamp application centers and the occasional job fair, where lines of job-seekers were never short. I traveled around in a van with volunteers from the Coalition for the Homeless as they distributed free hot meals at night to the city's most defeated and destitute inhabitants.

I visited union halls, food pantries, immigrant community centers and the dreadful Emergency Assistance Unit (EAU) in the Bronx. I interviewed community organizers, economists, politicians, leaders of nonprofit advocacy groups--as well as the jobless, homeless and hopeless. I wanted to understand better how the other half lives now, and who was responsible for this misery in the midst of this new, twenty-first-century Gilded Age of excess produced by the money culture, corporate scandal and the concentration of wealth and power.

What I learned was that in some ways little has changed since Riis published his reportorial findings in 1890. The poor are still largely invisible to the complacent majority. Most Americans don't see the everydayness of poverty. It is segregated in "bad neighborhoods" and in impersonal government waiting rooms. We don't see all the people being told there are no applications for food stamps available at that location; all the people postponing medical treatment for their children because they don't have health insurance; all the people trying to find a job with their phone service shut off because they couldn't pay the bill; or all the deliverymen for drugstores and supermarkets paid only $3 an hour, which is illegal

In one way we are even worse off than we were 113 years ago: We have no Jacob Riis now humanizing poverty, making the satisfied see it and smell it. We have no American Dickens or Orwell, no James Agee and Walker Evans, no Michael Harrington, no John Steinbeck, no Edward R. Murrow.

Something else in addition to poverty's invisibility that harks back to the first Gilded Age is the widening economic disparity between the rich and poor. During the Reagan presidency, the poor lost tremendous ground. And during the Clinton presidency, the rich did fabulously well. In 1998 the top 1 percent of households collected almost 17 percent of the nation's income. And now Bush is proposing a tax cut that gives the richest 5 percent of taxpayers most of the economic gain. This is a class-warfare policy of shooting the wounded and looting the amputees.

What is amazing is that this expansion of inequality took place without ever becoming a noticeable issue in American politics. This growing concentration of wealth has given the superrich domination over politics through extravagant campaign contributions and media ownership, which has made large elements of the media sound like Republican echo chambers. The increasing gap between rich and poor and the erosion of democracy by vast wealth are not hot-button talk-show issues because so few politicians with a national following agitate about them with continuing conviction. Only Ted Kennedy, John McCain and the late Paul Wellstone come to mind. None of the leading Democrats seeking the 2004 presidential nomination are talking about the maldistribution of wealth or mobilizing a new war on poverty or a massive jobs program. Cerebral, suburban Gary Hart was quoted in a February 2 New York Times Magazine profile as saying: "How do you make the principles of equality and justice and fairness work in a time when everyone's well off?" I would gladly take Hart on a tour of New York's communities of sorrow.

I conceived this piece as a way to dramatize the growth of poverty in liberal, pro-labor New York City. But there is also a bigger, national picture that frames the local reporting. This big picture has many layers. It is not only the Republican ascendancy in Washington, Albany and the courts. It is not just the capitulating silences of Democrats. It is not just the fading power of the AFL-CIO. It is not just the historical forces well beyond New York's capacity to influence--like global terrorism, the recessions of the business cycle, the bursting of the Internet technology bubble, the crushing state and city deficits made worse by Bush's radicalism for the rich. It's all of the above and more. For all of New York's real estate, banking, media, marketing and cultural power--and for all its mystique--it is still just a cork bobbing on the ocean of capitalism.

Only during FDR's New Deal was economic disparity significantly reduced. More recently, in addition to the dramatic redistribution of income upward, wealth (property, investments, stocks, bonds and other assets) has become even more concentrated in a few hands than income is. The wealthy fared as well under Clinton as they did under Grover Cleveland--also a Democrat--during the original Gilded Age. The top 5 percent of Americans now own almost 60 percent of the country's wealth--the same 5 percent who would receive most of the benefit from Bush's proposed tax cut.

Downward mobility is the hot new trend in the city of buzz and billionaires. By every measure, unemployment, homelessness and hunger are on the rise in New York. In December, unemployment jumped up to 8.4 percent, the highest it has been in five years, the highest of any of the country's big cities. New York has lost 176,000 jobs in the past two years, more than any other city. Today more than 1.6 million New Yorkers (20.2 percent of the population) are living below the federal poverty line; another 13 percent are barely above it.

And, as always, poverty is more severe among people of color. Blacks and Latinos comprise 47.5 percent of the city's labor force but account for 61.2 percent of the jobless. The city's poverty rate is 25 percent for blacks, 28 percent for Hispanics and 12 percent for whites. It's been double for people of color for generations. There are now 38,000 homeless people in city shelters each winter night--and 17,000 of them are children. Homelessness has increased by 82 percent since 1998. In 2002 the city's network of 1,000 soup kitchens and food pantries affiliated with the New York Food Bank--many faith-based--fed 45 percent more hungry people than they did two years earlier. And about 90 percent of these hungry people are not homeless, and do have a history of work.

"Hunger among the working poor is a growing trend," Joel Berg, the director of the Coalition Against Hunger, told me. "It's caused by skyrocketing rents, a minimum wage that has been stagnant at $5.15 an hour since 1997, rising costs for health insurance and the city restricting access to food stamps while Giuliani was mayor." Every day the city's soup kitchens and food pantries provide about 1 million people with meals. The Coalition Against Hunger reports that because of increased demand, in 2001, the soup kitchens and food pantries have had to turn away 350,000 New Yorkers--including 85,000 children.

Every Thursday morning, at the Yorkville Common Pantry, on 109th Street in East Harlem, there is a long line of silent, dejected women with shopping carts, waiting for fresh meats and canned goods to be distributed by volunteers when the doors open at 11:30 am. On my occasional visits to this line, I saw that most of these Hispanic women were mothers with children who had sporadic histories of at least part-time work. I also met a recent Russian immigrant who had no coat and a woman attending some night classes who had lost her job, exhausted her health insurance and suffered serious depression but could not afford the medication to treat it. Her grandest dream, she said, is "to move to a safer block."

New York's economy has declined for seven consecutive quarters. Consumer confidence is vaporizing. Inflation is rising faster than wages. Personal bankruptcies are up as a consequence of credit-card debt and predatory lending by the jackals of recession. And to make future prospects even darker, the state has a $10 billion budget deficit while the city's is $3 billion, at a time when the President is refusing to assist the states. New York City now faces state-imposed transit-fare increases, college tuition increases and a $1.2 billion cut in state education funding.

The Low-Wage World

Most poor people work. The roughly $10,700 a year that $5.15-an-hour minimum-wage jobs pay is without question not sufficient to hold a family together in New York. But a big part of the city's poverty crisis is the World of Low-Wage Work, just above the legal minimum--"McJobs," as organizers call them. There are hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who are trapped in such jobs, from which they can be fired or lose shifts on the whim of a supervisor, at big chain franchises like McDonald's, Tower Records, Duane Reade drugstores and Gristedes supermarkets.

In testimony before the City Council on behalf of a living-wage bill, David Jones, president of the Community Service Society, a nonprofit social service agency, said that "one-in-five New York workers earns less than $8.10 an hour. Three-quarters of those earning less than $8.10 an hour are living in poverty." According to a comprehensive CSS study, 52.6 percent of low-wage workers are women; six out of ten have a high school diploma; and more than one in ten is a college graduate. Eight in ten are people of color. They are not teenagers working part-time jobs or subsidized members of middle-income households. More than 90 percent of those trapped in low-wage jobs are adults. More than 75 percent are now working full-time. They are not substance abusers, alcoholics or the mentally ill.

More than 600,000 New Yorkers earn between $5.15 an hour and $10 an hour. Some 56 percent of these low-wage workers have no health insurance for their families, 52 percent have no pension or 401(k) plan and 37 percent receive no paid leave. The CSS survey found that 27 percent of these workers fell behind in rent payments during the past year, 18 percent had their utilities shut off and 14 percent had to postpone necessary medical treatment. This low-wage world includes busboys, waitresses, janitors, food-service workers, store clerks, security guards, porters, maids, home health aides, day laborers and deliverymen. In late January, a federal judge in Manhattan ruled that more than 200 deliverymen were being paid less than $3 an hour by the Duane Reade drugstore chain. Most of these workers are immigrants from West Africa; as a group, they had been cheated out of $1 million in back pay.

A political tragedy is that only three unions are aggressively trying to organize the most underpaid workers: Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union, Local 32BJ, also of the SEIU, and the Hotel Trades Council, which is unionizing maids, housekeepers and employees of private clubs. Without the protection of unionization, collective bargaining and job security, low-wage workers are powerless in this savage season of high unemployment and intense competition for bad jobs. The simultaneous trend of Republican electoral ascendancy shoves these low-wage workers into a deeper hole, since Republican policies like tax cuts for the rich and budget cuts for the poor increase poverty and diminish the standard of living.

But late last year, the overwhelmingly Democratic City Council did pass two important laws to protect low-wage workers. They were enacted mostly because of the intense lobbying and targeted campaign donations of Local 1199 and Local 32BJ. First, the Council passed a compromise version of the living-wage law that gave 50,000 home healthcare workers--Local 1199 members--a minimum wage of $8.10 an hour if they have health insurance, $9.60 if not. This will become $10 an hour by 2006. The law covers employees of companies that receive homecare contracts from the city government--the basis for the legislative jurisdiction over wages. The scope of the bill was narrowed during negotiations between Council Speaker Gifford Miller and Mayor Mike Bloomberg, with about 2,000 building and other service workers deleted from coverage. But Local 32BJ got something else in return that they desired almost as much. This was the Displaced Building Service Worker Protection Act, which requires landlords, managers and contractors of newly acquired commercial properties of fifty units or more to retain on the payroll all union and nonunion workers for a ninety-day grace period.

32BJ was a notoriously corrupt union a few years ago. But now, under president Mike Fishman, and with an engaged membership of 70,000, it made its presence felt at the City Council. Every time there was a hearing on this bill, there were seventy-five or a hundred union members in purple union T-shirts, filling the chamber. A recent court-authorized wiretap recorded unsolicited praise for this union under Fishman's leadership. A Genovese crime family capo known as "Sammy Meatballs" was overheard talking about the union. "It's a very good union for the men," the gangster was complaining. "Y'know what I mean? Usually whoever belongs to it don't want to give that up. The men get treated good and they get good salaries." In the bad old days, this union was in collusion with the mob, selling labor peace and signing sweetheart contracts that screwed the membership. Now Local 32BJ is starting to demonstrate that even in this harsh economic and political climate, a democratic union can make a positive difference.

The difficulty is that too many private-sector unions are too timid or too much a part of the Establishment to hire the best organizers, think big, take risks and embrace an activist mission. Fishman, Dennis Rivera of Local 1199 and Peter Ward, the leader of the Hotel and Motel Trades Union Council, are the exceptions. Unfortunately, they don't have the jurisdiction to organize the exploited workers at the large nonunion chains.